In2Freedom: A Journal Journey with Brad Jersak’s “Different” Jesus

Examining "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak

Day 26

“For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.” (Paul’s concern from 2 Corinthians 11:4)

The False Filter	The Biblical Filter
The word OR the Word	The Word THROUGH the word

My knowledge of the Wild Pacific Trail in Ucluelet, British Columbia, is far more from my experiences of hiking the trail numerous times than reading brochures or signposts about the trail. The same is true of my experience with the Bible as God’s word. I know far more about what it says and means from decades of reading it than I have learned by reading books about it.

With that in mind, I approach BJ’s guided journey through his thoughts about “Canonicity” as someone who knows the trail through Scripture far more than I know what men have written about Scripture. While some would say that is a disadvantage (not knowing all the details of how the canon of Scripture was determined), for me it is simply my place in the body of Christ, to have a familiarity with the trail of Scripture that will help me assess the trail through BJ’s beliefs that will either affirm what I already know, uncover things I have never seen, or expose BJ as a rebellious deceiver.

My starting place is simple: I’ve already been down this path. I have already seen that the Bible is what the Bible calls “Scripture”. It fits that it is the word of God, the word of the Lord, and the word of Christ. Everything it claims as having authority from God, and everything I know about how Israel and the Church have acknowledged the authority of Scripture, leaves me feeling confident that I know enough that the best BJ can do is explain the brochure (so to speak) of how the Wild Pacific Trail was created. But if he tries to tell me that what I have traveled numerous times is not the Wild Pacific Trail, or that the Amphitrite Lighthouse is just a figurative term for a rock face that glistens in the evening sun, or that Oyster Jim was not really the brains and brawn of getting this trail developed, well, I will have to leave him in God’s hands on that one and continue hiking the trail knowing it is what it is, and that the well-documented history of its development is the true story of this amazing journey through God’s creation.

So, with that analogy stuck in our heads, let’s head out on the garden path BJ is setting before us to see what we discover about him in relation to what we know about God and his word.

BJ’s Claim:

I was taught that the canon of Scripture is our inerrant plumb line and final authority. Why? Because the books in the canon are inerrant and authoritative. Again, this way of thinking verged on circular reasoning, but we meant that the church ultimately canonized the books it recognized as inspired (p. 73).

Monte’s Reply: No, it is not “circular reasoning” to affirm the Bible is the collection of breathed-out books of God when both senses of authority have been met (that the sources spoke as though they had authority, and both Israel and the Church acknowledged that these sources possessed authority).

BJ’s Claim:

Used in this way, the canon of Scripture naturally and subtly replaced Jesus Christ as the Word of God and our final authority for faith and practice (p. 73).

Monte’s Reply: Absolutely false! “Used in this way” means, viewing the Bible as the collection of books that have met both senses of authority and are trusted to be the “breathed out” words of God. What the author says next is a lie that has already been exposed. In the sphere of the church we refer to as “evangelical” (believing in the evangel, the gospel, the good news of salvation), when we speak of the Bible as “the final authority for faith and practice”, we never mean in relation to Jesus Christ as head of his church. We mean this as the plumbline of truth among the people of God (and the impersonators among us). None of us can appeal to Christ as our head independent of Scripture, so the way we govern how us servants of Christ live while awaiting his return is by appealing to the Scriptures as our final authority. You know, the manual the Master has left us to govern ourselves until his return!

BJ is being utterly dishonest to keep claiming the church has “replaced Jesus Christ as the Word of God” or replaced him as “our final authority for faith and practice.” The way we know what he has to say about how we govern ourselves as the people of God is by reading his manual, hearing his words, and doing what he says. And yes, it is a pitiful ploy to be this utterly dishonest about what issue we are addressing and how that helps us understand how the church settled on which books were the canon of Scripture. There is NO conflict between Jesus and the Scriptures.

I will only mention this because I already explained it in an earlier journal entry, but Jesus himself said that the wise builders were those who both heard his words and put them into practice. That is what we are doing when we hear his words in the Scriptures and put them into practice. We aren’t replacing him; we are doing what he tells us to do while he is gone!

BJ’s Claim:

This is how people in the Sikh religion see their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which they treat as their last and perpetual living guru. They symbolically seat it on a throne in the temple and put it to bed at night. The message is that their book is the current guru that succeeded the ten previous human gurus (p. 73).

Monte’s Reply: BJ’s claim is that, in the way he is lying about Christians replacing Jesus as the Word, and replacing Jesus as the final authority on all we believe and do, he compares that to the way other religions worship their religious writings. This is what is called a “false equivalence”. It is making two things equivalent when they clearly are not. That is the case here. It is another layer of the deception in this book that the author must resort to false equivalencies to make a point that is dishonest and deceptive through-and-through.

BJ’s Claim:

Is that what Christianity has done in practice? (p. 73).

Monte’s Reply: Answer: absolutely not! We (speaking of evangelical Christianity, not any cultish groups) do not treat the Bible as replacing Christ, deserving of worship (bibliolatry is the idolatry of the Bible), or more authoritative than Christ himself. As I will keep repeating with each deception BJ suggests, the Bible is our final authority over the people of God while we await Jesus’ return. Period. We are always looking at how to get to know the Word THROUGH the word!

BJ’s Claim:

I see two problems with this sense of canon: (p. 73).

Monte’s Reply: Again, BJ is fabricating his “this sense of the canon” that does not apply. It isn’t what the evangelical church has done with the Scriptures. He is making his own “strawman” version of what us poor ignorant Christians are doing so he can look like the hero in saving everyone from this horrible mistake. However, it is the author who is deceiving with his “this sense of canon”, which means that whatever comes next is more of his false equivalence, trying to make things appear one way when they are clearly quite different than his claim.

Because BJ is already lying to us about what we are dealing with, I am just going to look through what he says next about the history of the church settling on the canon of Scripture to see if there is anything to address, and at the end of that, I will share some links to some reputable sources that explain these things in a way that can be trusted.

BJ’s Claim:

That is, the canon of faith was established by Christ and his apostles from the beginning, but the canon of Scripture has always been hotly contested. In fact, the canon of Scripture differs from Protestant to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to Coptic Orthodox to Ethiopian Orthodox and beyond…to this day!³³ (pp. 74-75).

Monte’s Reply: Whenever I hear that something was “hotly contested”, I want to know why. In Acts 15 we see the introduction of a teaching contrary to the gospel that caused Paul and Barnabas to have “no small dissension and debate” with the perpetrators. Knowing who was promoting truth and who was promoting error made it clear that Paul was doing God’s will by standing against this false teaching. However, there are plenty of examples in Jesus’ ministry where those who “hotly contested” something were in the wrong because they were speaking against Jesus!

So, it means nothing to me, in a sense, that people don’t agree on something. That isn’t the issue. The issue is who is showing that the books they believe are Scripture have that source-of-authority (as of God) and were recognized as possessing authority by Israel or the Church. I already know that I would (and have) “hotly contested” all kinds of BJ’s claims because they are not accurate in explaining Scripture, and utterly false in describing the problem he thinks he is solving.

BJ’s Claim: Speaking of how church leaders sought to rely on the Holy Spirit regarding decisions of which books were “Scripture”, BJ writes,

They were conscious and dependent on Jesus’s promise that the Spirit of truth would guide them into all truth.³⁴ All truth about what? The truth of who Jesus is and what he has done (p. 75).

Monte’s Reply: Uh… well… how ‘bout we keep it the way it was breathed out! You know… “all truth”! Consider what Jesus (the Word) said (as the word of God) that is now written (Scripture as the word of God) so we can test what BJ just said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16:13).

Because this book is making me work so hard, please allow me some grace here to point out some obvious bits of information.

First, what God breathed out through John presents “the Spirit of truth”. It does not say, the Spirit of “the truth of who Jesus is and what he has done”. It says, “the Spirit of (the) truth”. Yes, the “the” is there. There is nothing in that title for the Spirit that indicates he is the superintendent of the truth about Jesus but not about any truth about anything else (like carrying men along to write about creation, the fall, the flood, the prophets, the epistles). He is the Spirit of “the truth”, so if he carried a man along to write down what he was given by the Father, what we have in their writings are the words of the Father, Scripture, the word of God, truth!

Second, when John describes the work of the “Spirit of truth”, it says, “he will guide you into all the truth”. Yes, he guides the church to act according to the truth. He guides “you” (plural), meaning the church. No favoritism. No partiality. The Spirit is the Spirit of truth, so he must teach the same things to all God’s people. And he guides the church “into all the truth”, NOT into only the truth about Jesus and what he has done for us.

It is “into”, meaning that we will walk in the truth as the apostles taught. It is “all”, meaning the whole entire thing (the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… SO… HELP… US… GOD!!!). That absolutely denies us the right to limit the truth to the person and work of Jesus. This absolutely includes ALL truth, including what is written about creation, the Fall, the flood, the prophets, the gospels, the history of the church in Acts, and the epistles to the churches. All truth means ALL truth. And, “truth” is the same word for truth as in “the Spirit of truth”. It is truth. It is, as Bible Sense Lexicon defines it, “truth (quality) n. — conformity to reality or actuality; often with the implication of dependability.”

Third, Jesus again makes it clear that he and the Holy Spirit are always in submission to the Father. This has huge implications about BJ’s claim that Jesus corrected his Father for immorality and injustice. He has yet to show us any example of Jesus doing this in the Bible. However, I suspect that this is why BJ needs to deceive people into thinking that truth in the Bible is only what it says about Jesus, and that the Bible cannot be trusted as the authoritative word of God. I’m only guessing where this garden path is leading, but I have a strong suspicion that we will arrive in a clearing somewhere that is all about his “another Jesus” who has the authority (with BJ’s hand in the puppet), to tell us why the God of creation, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and of the nation of Israel, Moses, and the prophets, needs to be corrected to fit the Jesus BJ wanted to find in the Bible.

My point here is that the canon of Scripture is what the Church believes is the truth that was given to the church through men who were carried along by the Spirit to write down the breathed-out words of God. It is all the truth about everything it addresses, including the true Lord Jesus Christ.

I’m not going to try to wade through BJ’s synopsis of the history of canonicity, but will leave it to the reader to either do their own research, or read the articles I include in the footnotes. I will simply point out things that need clarification to make sure we’re not heading down the wrong path.

BJ’s Claim:

…canonical doesn’t mean “in the Bible” so much as it means “those books that align with the gospel message” (p. 75).

Monte’s Reply: All I will say here is that I’m not sure this is accurate. My understanding of canonical has to do with the character of documents that fit both senses of authority so that it is understood that they are Scripture, meaning, the breathed-out words of God written down. Because BJ is trying to dissociate his “another Jesus” from “all Scripture”, and from the Yahweh we see revealed in the Scriptures Jesus affirmed, I’m not even sure if I know what his “gospel message” is. He has already failed in his attempt to denounce the penal substitutionary atonement, so I’m not sure what he hopes will replace that. At this point, I simply put out this clarification that documents were included in the canon of Scripture because they were considered to meet both senses of authority and so they were received as the authoritative word of God no matter what the writers were led to record.

BJ’s Claim:

In practice, what did the compilers of the Bible treat as the object and measure of the Spirit’s infallible guidance? It was the person and gospel of Jesus Christ. You know: the Word of God” (p. 75)!

Monte’s Reply:

Again, because I am not doing a study of the history of canonicity here, but trying to assess what BJ says about it, it simply doesn’t make sense to me that, if the Spirit of truth is leading the church into all the truth, that those early leaders would limit inclusion to “the person and gospel of Jesus Christ”. Yes, that is everything to us. Jesus is everything to us. Jesus is the Word of God who is everything to us. The gospel is everything to us.

BUT… if the Spirit of truth is leading the church into all truth, then the criteria for inclusion would likely be whether a document came with both senses of authority (that it presented itself as authoritative and was recognized to possess authority). They were looking for what fit the description of men being carried along by the Spirit to write down God’s breathed-out words for the edification of the church. I am sure I will get clarification from reading the reputable articles on this topic, but BJ’s record of dishonesty has me wondering why he needs everything to be limited to Jesus as “the Word of God” but dissociated from “the word of God” as we have it in the Bible.

I will end here because we have a lot of trail ahead of us on this topic of the Canonicity of the Bible. As promised, here are some links to articles on this topic that can be compared/contrasted to what BJ is giving us in his book.[1] I can see that we’re heading into a description of false teachers that seems to match what I’m finding in this journey, so who knows what discoveries await.

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)

Jersak, Bradley. A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way. Whitaker House. Kindle Edition.

Definitions from the Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) in Logos Bible Systems

[1] How and when was the canon of the Bible put together? (Got Questions)

https://www.gotquestions.org/canon-Bible.html

Please note the “for further study” and “related articles” links at the end of this article.

What is the canon of Scripture? (Got Questions)

https://www.gotquestions.org/canon-of-Scripture.html

The Biblical Canon (an essay by Michael J. Kruger of TGC, the Gospel Coalition)

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-biblical-canon/

The Authority And Meaning Of The Christian Canon (John Piper – Desiring God)

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-authority-and-meaning-of-the-christian-canon

How We Got the Bible (Dirk Jongkind – Desiring God)